Hundreds of supporters marched Justin Pearson through Memphis to the Shelby county board of commissioners meeting on Wednesday, chanting and cheering before entering the commission chambers, where officials quickly voted 7-0 to restore him to his position.
“The message for all the people in Nashville who decided to expel us: You can’t expel hope. You can’t expel justice,” Pearson said at the meeting, his voice rising as he spoke. “You can’t expel our voice. And you sure can’t expel our fight.”
Pearson is the second of two Democratic state lawmakers to return to the statehouse after being expelled last week by Republicans over a gun safety protest following another school shooting. Justin Jones was returned to his seat on Monday in a unanimous vote by the Nashville council.
After the reinstatement vote, a throng of jubilant supporters greeted Pearson outside in a churchlike celebration. Pearson adopted the cadence of a preacher as he delivered a rousing speech with call-and-response crowd interaction. Accompanied by his fiancee, mother and four brothers, Pearson pumped his fist, jumped up and down, and hugged relatives.
“They’ve awakened a sleeping giant,” he said, as a drumbeat and roaring cheers echoed his voice.
Pearson is expected to return to the capitol in Nashville on Thursday, when the house holds its next floor session, and plans to be sworn in there.
Pearson, 29, and fellow Democrat Justin Jones, 27, will serve as interim state representatives to fill the vacancies created when they were ousted for taking part in a gun reform protest in the chamber following the murders of six people last month at a Nashville school. Jones and Pearson have said they plan to run in the special elections for the seats which will take place in the coming months.
The two Black men had recently joined the legislature and condemned their expulsion as a racist action. Joe Biden had criticized the expulsion as unprecedented and Kamala Harris railed against the action on a hastily arranged trip to Nashville last Friday less than 24 hours after the two lawmakers were ousted.
The commission meeting was preceded by a protest rally at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis in support of Pearson, who said in a powerful New York Times opinion essay on Wednesday that he “wasn’t elected to be pushed to the back of the room and silenced”.
A community organizer before entering politics, Pearson condemned what he saw as hypocrisy from Republican lawmakers.
“There is something amiss in the decorum of the state house when GOP leaders like Representative Paul Sherrell, who proposed death from ‘hanging by a tree’ as an acceptable form of state execution (Mr Sherrell later apologized for his comment), feel comfortable berating Mr Jones and me for our peaceful act of civil disobedience.
“This, in Tennessee, the birthplace of the Klan, a land stained with the blood of lynchings of my people.”
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The Republican majority opted not to expel a third member of the so-called Tennessee Three, Democrat Gloria Johnson, 60, who is white.
In his op-ed, Pearson also called out Republicans, in Tennessee and elsewhere, for promoting a swath of pro-gun legislation he said left the US “a nation in pain and peril”. Thousands were drawn to the statehouse in Nashville to protest the Covenant school shooting, he said, but were ignored by his Republican colleagues.
“Some have averted their eyes and hurried into the chamber, walking through hundreds of mourning protesters to discuss a bill to further expand gun rights by allowing teachers to carry weapons on campus,” he said.
“But many of us did not. We stopped and embraced traumatized children, parents and elders. We prayed. We protested.”
On Tuesday, Bill Lee, Tennessee’s Republican governor, said he would sign an executive order to strengthen background checks for weapons purchases in the state, and called on lawmakers to pass a red flag law to keep guns away from those who pose a danger to themselves or others.
“We should set aside politics and pride and accomplish something that the people of Tennessee want to see get accomplished,” Lee said. The governor and his wife, Maria, were friends with two teachers killed at the Covenant school.
Pearson acknowledged Lee’s action in his essay as “a small victory for our people clamoring for change”.